My worldbuilding guidelines
So, recently I've been working a lot on this thing called Cyana, for a lot of reasons. With an examination of my past, it's the thing that I've most wanted to do, and it's been a culmination of all kinds of things that fascinate me and that I've created in the past more fully realized. It's also something that I've never really done before, at least not to this extent. It's a high fantasy. I've done low fantasy before (that's technically what Growing Around ''is) and it's interesting how different the whole experience is. I don't want to go into full detail here what the difference is between them, as there is a lot of debate. My own definition is that low fantasy is more about fanciful concepts and what they can do; and high fantasy is a lot more about how those fanciful concepts ''work. In high fantasy, the concepts and the world must be highly tangible; things need to make complete sense in their own world. In low fantasy, the story is that "this concept is happening and that's the story." At least to me. Everyone has different opinions on the matter. But it's interesting that both with high fantasy and low fantasy, my work tends to risk being misunderstood as a trapping of the genre. I suppose that I'm lucky that I grew up engrossed in fantasy works. My favorite game of all time is (was) Morrowind; I watched shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender; was into a wide array of fantasy books. I'm not saying that that makes me great at anything, but I am familiar with the way that this is "supposed to work" and the differences between the two main types of fantasy. In high fantasy, the story that the audience gets is only a small fragment of the ''story. You only get small, tiny glimpses of what's to be seen. There are stories and mythologies and legends hidden beyond the veil, where you need a ''Silmarrilion to begin getting a complete picture. And there's even more explanation beyond that in an endless fractal-like way. High fantasy is an attempt to recreate the real world in a fantastical image, which is a powerful and complex undertaking. How one goes upon this monumental task varies from individual to individual, but here are the guidelines that I tend to use, and I hope that it becomes clearer and clear what kind of work that Cyana is eventually meant to be. Now all of these guidelines are more-or-less as important as each other, so I'm going to be writing them down in any order. Guideline#1: "This is the way it's always been" is bullshit. Everything that has been written down about everything in my fantasy worlds are simply as they are now. Every single statue, every little bit of the way things are has an explanation behind it. The values the people hold have grown and changed. Even centuries old traditions rise and fall. Technology rises and falls (Roman concrete for instance). Speaking of which, nations rise and fall. A country that lasts for a thousand years is not going to look like how it did when it was first founded. If "it's just that good" then someone else is going to come by, trying to war and take the "it's just that good" land and change it in some way. Just because the Pyramids of Giza are still around today doesn't mean that Egypt is still ruled by Pharaohs. Keep in mind everything that's changed over the last 100 years. My country didn't exist 500 years ago. 1000 years ago, it wasn't common knowledge that the continent was a thing (except to the people that lived there already, obviously). Remember, people who lived during the first airplane flight were still alive to be able to see the first steps on the moon. If I make something that happened say... 10,000 years ago, the life style in the current year should be goddamn incomprehensible to the people back then; and probably even vice-versa. Also as a corollary: Guideline #1.5: Time may be linear, but human society is not Society tends to go from extreme to extreme. They decide that they can't take one way of life and then rebel and go too far to the other extreme. Things go back and forth all of the time. Governments, ideologies, and even technologies have been founded, lost, changed, reinterpreted, etc. Things are much more cyclical, than they are linear. Empire rises, empire gets too big for itself and can't govern all of it any more, or governs it in a way that causes the people to revolt, empire falls and repeat the process all over again. Guideline #2: If I'd feel 100% comfortable in any civilization I've created, I'm doing it wrong I don't even like 100% of everything in my own culture; the one that I was born in and live in every single day. It would be absolutely ludicrous to assume that a civilization could make... well, anyone happy one-hundred percent. Also, the terrain and things like "their art" doesn't count. I'm talking about ingrained cultural beliefs, rituals, they way that they treat certain kinds of people, etc. It's ludicrous to assume that everyone in a society is happy with it, and that anyone is 100% happy. Even the dictatorial king who controls everything is paranoid that the peasants might revolt at any moment and someone might try to poison his soup. I wouldn't go out of my way to go... "oh, this country doesn't have a disgusting belief, I'd better add one", but this is always something to keep in mind to stop me from idealizing or exoticizing something that I've created. It doesn't have to be something that makes me feel like I wouldn't want to live there, but I certainly wouldn't want to live there in every single situation. That even includes Cyana's home island country of Muta. Also, it should be noted that this doesn't include its opposite. It's perfectly okay for me to create a culture where I would be 100% uncomfortable and wouldn't want to spend a day in my life there. Places can be ravaged by famine or disease; rituals can get downright evil; rulers can become extremely corrupt and repressive; prejudices can spread, etc. I probably wouldn't go over-the-top and include all of these things at once, but I don't have a guideline against making a complete shithole. Guideline #3: Multiple points of view If two people go to an event, there are three points of view: person a's, person b's, and the dog watching them. None of which are exactly what actually happen. Histories and mythologies are full of interpretation and reinterpretation, poetic license, exaggeration, misidentified archaeology, etc. If region A and region B had a battle, hundreds of years ago, both sides are going to spin it differently, for instance. It might be as simple as that they don't agree on how many people died, or it can be as complex as both of them disagreeing why the battle was even fought. Things could be forgotten completely or mythologized and turned into a legend. Poets could spin the story in all kinds of directions (for an example, Vikings having horned helmets). And this is just for the stuff that could reasonably be within memory. With things like creation myths, it gets even more complex. I shouldn't just leave at disagreement either. If the wounds of a battle are very intense, a person from one country might be downright offended at a person from another's country interpretation of that battle. Guideline #4: Don't get squeamish This is sort of a corollary to number 2. Humans have been known to do some bizarre shit, and some truly disgusting shit too. And that's before you push it into fantasy. To downplay or to bowdlerize a society for the sake of being squeamish or uncomfortable is dishonorable to the tale itself. Just because I'm writing it, does not mean I'm endorsing it, even if there are characters within the narrative that endorse it. In fact, it's possible to portray something as awful even if no character in the work thinks that it's awful. It's called the narration. Guideline #5: You can't overthink this, but you can overtell this There's no such thing as an unnecessary detail. If I put every single one of them into the actual book that I'm going to write, yes. But for the actual backstories and the volumes of planning; no, nothing is unnecessary. Figuring out what the people of a culture eat is important, but figuring out what the food eats can make the world feel even more real. Does the audience need to know that Muta's combs are made out of the jawbone of a fish? Probably not. But, do I? Well, if I do, I can design up that fish, what else it's used for, and how the people of Muta catch it, which can help define another aspect of their culture. Fantasy worlds are like that endless fractal. Everything you learn can help you uncover more details, and nothing is in isolation. Also, avoid the temptation to front-load this all to the reader. Tell them only what they need to know, and always remember that proper nouns are filtered out. What most people saw reading this is "does the audience need to know that combs are made out of the jawbone of a fish"? And no matter what name, I give that fish, it will always be a to the audience. Guideline #6: Start with resources When you start building a new country or culture, the first thing that should always be decided is which resources will be available. This will determine the food that they have, the places they live in, their international relations, the tools that they have and need, the technologies that they might produce, cultural norms, the hardships that they endure, what the people might wear and look like (people in the desert aren't going to be wearing heavy fur clothing, even if furry animals are nearby). Guideline #7: Make sure the details line up This should be an obvious one, but it's easy to miss. For example, in the movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire, it's revealed that the Atlanteans have a language that they can no longer read because that knowledge has been lost to them. That's a fine idea. It's also revealed that Atlanteans can live for thousands of years. That's also a fine idea. But when you put them together, you have people who were alive when Atlanteans could read just deciding to... stop doing that for no real reason, and knowledge being lost... despite that knowledge being there and the people possessing that knowledge still being around. I've even done it myself in plotting. In my notes for Cyana's hometown, I've said that the people are on a system of "if the people who make the bow & arrows don't give me a bow & arrows, they won't get the food from the animal I'm supposed to hunt." I also wrote down that rich people in this culture have something special. This culture logically cannot have rich people; or at least, our idea of "rich." So many details are absolutely wonderful... but so many less details are absolutely wonderful when placed together. Guideline #8: Cultural virtues are expensive In Cyana's country, I've decided that the biologically different races of tanun and hollowblood are treated as equals. However, they have different biological needs, and that must be accounted for. Tanun, for instance, are constantly charging powers and they basically need to discharge every single day so they don't... well, explode. To get this virtue of equality between them, a choice must be made - either the hollowbloods have to deal with random discharges of fire and lightning, or the tanun must be educated or trained to control their powers. However, if you select one of these groups for specialized training to prevent them from doing something incredibly destructive, the other group is going to start assuming that they are naturally destructive, even after training, so this virtue needs even more compensation. For me to make this work, the hollowblood need to do something "equivalent" to get the virtue that I want this culture to have. Any virtue that a culture has requires reasons, and those reasons are at the very least hard, if not counter-intuitive. A crimeless culture, for example, would have a very repressive government. Too much "freedom" and the place becomes chaotic. Too much "peace" and the country will be invaded and conquered by another country that doesn't have that value. Everything costs some kind of substantial effort, and generally the people inside are not going to even agree on what that value even is. Guideline #9: The real world has done a ton of work for you already So... say I want to come up with a tree that isn't your standard oak or maple. Something that looks like most of what my audience wouldn't recognize. Well, there are these things: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracaena…. Seriously there are so many unique and wonderful and quite frankly fantastical creatures that exist in our own world. People have generally heard of things like the axoltol and the bombardier beetle, but there things like the leaf-footed bug: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coreidae and whatever this thing is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctenopho…. And that's ignoring things that don't exist anymore, like the megalodon or the trilobyte. And that's ignoring common every day plants and animals that we take how... unusual and weird they are for granted. A chameleon can change its skin color to communicate and has weird, rotating flies. The venus flytrap is a plant... that eats animals. Fireflies... glow. Common and over-used? Sure. But there are so many creatures that are really interesting when you stop to think about them. Guideline #10: the bare limitations Every living creature must do these three things - gather fuel, convert that fuel into energy and excrete it, and it must self-replicate. If it doesn't do these three things it will not be alive any creature. As a corollary, a society or a religion or whatever must produce children. A religion that says "childbirth is morally wrong, do not do it" will not last. Conversion is not enough for it to work. A society that does not produce enough children will collapse in on itself. Generally this can be focused as a starting point for how the society acts and behaves - gathering food, producing shelter, and creating the next generation to do the same is a simplified way of determining how that society is going to act. 'Guideline #11: There are always ways around restrictions '''For example, a god can "have always been," and one of the few things that can and keep the world cohesive. And there's always magic. Speaking of which. '''Guideline #12: Magic must be treated like any other element of nature '''If magic is easy-to-come by, it's going to touch everything and build and break entire economies, natural systems, and empires. If magic is hard-to-come by, it's probably because of how expensive it is and how people value it. It is still going to touch things like societal power-systems. **** I'm sure that there are more, but these are generally the guidelines that I follow when worldbuilding, for at least ''Cyana. And keep in mind, they are guidelines (not rules), and they are mine. People do have different philosophies when it comes to creating their own rules. This is just mine and the ones that seem to bring me the most success and the most satisfaction. The ones that create the most realistic rules and societies, even with magic people who blast lightning out of their eyes. Category:Miscellaneous